The Battle of All Mothers

Hilary Rosen and the misogynistic foundation of contemporary feminism.

By

James Taranto

April 12, 2012

In a February article about the unwieldily named Democratic National Committee chairman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, The Wall Street Journal noted that "Obama advisers have occasionally told her to 'tone it down,' " an end toward which she agreed "to enlist two seasoned Democratic female pros, Anita Dunn and Hilary Rosen, to begin giving her occasional political advice and media training."

One shudders to think what Wasserman Schultz would have said had she, rather than the understated Rosen, been assigned to attack Ann Romney, wife of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Even the toned-down version shocked a lot of people.

Here's what Rosen said on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees": "What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues. And when I listen to my wife, that's what I'm hearing. Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing."

Politico reports that male Democratic operatives rushed to Twitter to distance themselves. Campaign manager Jim Messina: "I could not disagree with Hilary Rosen any more strongly. Her comments were wrong and family should be off limits. She should apologize." Obama adviser David Axelrod: "Also Disappointed in Hilary Rosen's comments about Ann Romney. They were inappropriate and offensive."

ENLARGE

Hilary Rosen, honest feminist.
WireImage

She has her defenders, too. One is Salon's Steve Kornacki, who says nasty wingnuts are smearing Rosen by quoting her accurately: "It's a lot less inflammatory when you consider the context." Another is Hilary Rosen, who within three hours followed up her initial attack with a defensive screed at the Puffington Host, from which we learned that she doesn't know the meaning of the phrase "beg the question." Later she issued a nonapology that misused the word "fulsome."

It was not just catty and impolite but substantively wrong for Rosen to assert that Mrs. Romney, who raised five sons, has "never worked a day in her life." Raising children is a lot of work, and we'd venture to say it's more valuable work than, say, lobbying for the music industry or helping BP with its crisis communications, to name two of the highlights of Rosen's career.

But we shall resist the urge to pile on Hilary Rosen. It seems to us she deserves thanks for her honesty--for underscoring a sometimes overlooked truth about contemporary feminism.

In an essay for the New York Times last Mother's Day, feminist historian Stephanie Coontz rebutted the myth "that 50 years ago women who stayed home full time with their children enjoyed higher social status and more satisfying lives than they do today." Coontz concedes that this was true 150 years ago but argues that by the mid-20th century the disparagement of motherhood was a major theme in American culture:

In the early 20th century, under the influence of Freudianism, Americans began to view public avowals of "Mother Love" as unmanly and redefine what used to be called "uplifting encouragement" as nagging. By the 1940s, educators, psychiatrists and popular opinion-makers were assailing the idealization of mothers; in their view, women should stop seeing themselves as guardians of societal and familial morality and content themselves with being, in the self-deprecating words of so many 1960s homemakers, "just a housewife."

Stay-at-home mothers were often portrayed as an even bigger menace to society than career women. In 1942, in his best-selling "Generation of Vipers," Philip Wylie coined the term "momism" to describe what he claimed was an epidemic of mothers who kept their sons tied to their apron strings, boasted incessantly of their worth and demanded that politicians heed their moralizing. . . .

Typical of the invective against homemakers in the 1950s and 1960s was a 1957 best seller, "The Crack in the Picture Window," which described suburban America as a "matriarchal society," with the average husband "a woman-bossed, inadequate, money-terrified neuter" and the average wife a "nagging slob."

Here's the kicker: "Anti-mom rhetoric was so pervasive that even [Betty] Friedan recycled some of this ideology in 'The Feminine Mystique'--including the repellent and now-discredited notion that overly devoted mothers turned their sons into homosexuals."

Now, this is a clever bit of misdirection on Coontz's part. She makes Friedan out to be a passive receptacle of "anti-mom rhetoric," which even led her to say things about homosexuality--in 1963, an obscure and poorly understood subject--that her admirers find embarrassing today.

In truth, anti-momism was the very heart of "The Feminine Mystique." Friedan's argument was that motherhood and homemaking were soul-deadening occupations and that pursuing a professional career was the way for a woman to "become complete." She agreed with the midcentury misogynists that a stay-at-home mother was, in Friedan's words, "castrative to her husband and sons." But she emphasized that women were "fellow victims."

The book might as well have been titled "Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?" Today, of course, she can, and because feminism has entailed a diminution of male responsibility, she often has no choice. As we've noted, an increasing number of women are choosing domestic life, finding it a liberating alternative to working for a boss. But to do so requires a husband with considerable means.

Fifty years ago, Ann Romney's life would have made her just a regular woman. Today, she is a countercultural figure--someone who lives in a way that the dominant culture regards with a hostile disdain. And she has chosen to live that way, which is why Hilary Rosen, as an intellectual heiress to Betty Friedan, regards her as a villain rather than a victim.

Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin found that high school math teachers rated the math abilities of their white female students lower than those of their white male peers, even when their grades and test scores were comparable. (The researchers say previous research has already documented a racial bias.)

In examining the data from a cohort of 15,000 students from their sophomore year of high school, into higher education and the work force, Catherine Riegle-Crumb found a "subtle" but "definitely present" tendency among high school teachers to deem their white female students less competent than white male students with similar grades and scores, and to consider them less comfortable in a particular math class, or to be less capable of advancing.

The bias "may very well be something they are not consciously aware of," says Dr. Riegle-Crumb, but that doesn't mean it's without influence. How do we help our teenage girls combat that?

Why is it merely assumed that the teachers are irrationally prejudiced against girls? Couldn't it be that boys actually are better on average at math?

Another report, from LiveScience.com, notes that what the Times calls "racial bias" actually is no such thing because minority kids' "test scores and grades were low," so that "reasonable data support the teachers' evaluations."

But the parity between white male and female test scores doesn't necessarily indicate equal ability. Perhaps what the teachers are seeing is that girls struggle more with math but ultimately do as well as the boys because of superior effort or focus.

We Have Always Been at War With the Individual Mandate The email we got yesterday from the Obama campaign is a real humdinger. Signed by campaign manager Jim Messina and carrying the subject line "Mitt Romney," it's actually an attack on Rep. Paul Ryan, this month's Emmanuel Goldstein. We especially love this point:

5. Romney [i.e., the Ryan budget] would end Medicare as we know it--replacing it with a voucher scheme that would drive profits for insurance companies by forcing seniors to purchase private insurance.

Imagine, forcing someone to buy private insurance! Oh, the horror!

Red: Better Dead Than Blue Rep. Allen West, a freshman Republican from Florida, stirred some controversy the other day when a questioner at a town-hall meeting asked him: "What percentage of the American legislature do you think are card-carrying Marxists?"

"That's a fair question," he replied in a segment caught on video. "I believe there's about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party." He went on to say, "It's called the Congressional Progressive Caucus."

Politico reports on the commies' reaction:

A top official of the Communist Party USA on Wednesday ripped Rep. Allen West's "sad ploy" for claiming that as many as 80 Democratic members of the House are communists. . . .

"It's just guilt by association taken to an extreme," he told POLITICO. He also said there are no members of Congress who are members of the Communist Party--not even avowed socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

We agree. West owes the Communist Party an apology for outrageously associating it with the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

"It's physically hard to breathe because of the ammonia" rising from manure pits below older barns, said the investigator, who would not allow his name to be used because that would prevent him from taking another undercover job in agriculture. He said that when workers needed to enter an older barn, they would first open doors and rev up exhaust fans, and then rush in to do their chores before the fumes became overwhelming.

Mice sometimes ran down egg conveyer belts, barns were thick with flies and manure in three barns tested positive for salmonella, he said.

Manure, mice and flies? In a barn? Who'd have thunk it? Seriously, though, talk about provincial. We have to wonder if Kristof has ever set foot outside the island of Manhattan.

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